My church, Advent Presbyterian, has just begun a long-term mission partnership with a small village called Cebu, in Honduras. Don’t bother looking it up… it’s too small to show on Google maps. It’s near El Progresso – you should be able to find that. Cebu consists of around 70 families, about 50% of which live in stick huts like this one:
The average income is about US$2-3 per day. Considering many kids don’t go to school because their families can’t afford the $50 per year tuition, it’s not likely that there is much hope for them to improve their living conditions. Just at the left of this picture, you can see one of the ‘nice’ houses: a four-room cinder block casa. The June 2011 Mission Team will build what is one of – we hope – many new cinder block houses. We hope that from here on out, the houses will be built by the people of Cebu themselves, providing some much needed work for some of the men. We will expect each recipient of a house to be involved in building the next… a “pay-it-forward” model.
Each house will cost a whopping $3,500. Yeah… the price of an ollllld used car here. Or an engagement ring or wedding dress (for many people). Compared to an average new US home, that’s just a pittance. But even though we’re insanely rich by Honduran standards, most of us don’t have $3,500 lying about. So we’ve split the cost up into 70 bricks costing $50 each. It’s our Stick to Brick mission. We’ll be raising money through brick adoption year-round. We hope to raise enough money to build one house a year.
Do you want to help? Please contact me at charlieandlu at gmail dot com. I’ll give you more details. ¡Muchas grácias!
Charlie + Lu 